Christians have a choice of following Jesus or following the Bible or the church. God is alive and present within you by the Spirit of Jesus. The Bible is a book, not a living person. The churches are conflicted and confused about many issues. Who or what do you follow?
Very few people know what is in the Bible and most church people don’t even try to follow “what the Bible says.” They don’t know the details of biblical material, and what they do know is so selective, distorted, contradictory and misrepresented that actually following the Bible is impossible.
This is not just an academic question. It is the basic question behind every problem created by abusive religion in America and many other countries. It is the question behind the attempts by religion to control government, politics, public attitudes and personal lives. It is the question that Jesus worked hardest to answer in his life and teachings.
How have you answered it? On what basis do you decide spiritual issues for yourself? Looking for God in the Bible is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope to see the truth. The Bible gives a consistently distorted view of everything. Face it: the Bible is a piece of 2,000 year old ancient history and is cast in languages that reflected a culture and world view that do not exist any more and is as far from us today as life on another planet.
Either Jesus is alive and present by the Spirit within you or you have no spiritual basis or guidance that is relevant to you as a 21st Century follower of Jesus. The truth of Jesus comes from within by love that is given to you by the Spirit.
Of course you could abandon Jesus and follow your own instincts and desires. I am not ready to make that leap of doubt. I am convinced that there is a lot more to Jesus than meets the eye or ear in contemporary religion. I want to know the real Jesus so that I can honestly follow Jesus myself and can share Jesus with you.
Does this mean abandoning the Four Gospels? No. The Four Gospels are the map. They are not the territory. They are not the person. Using the Gospels to discover the real Jesus is demanding, exhausting and necessary. Objective realistic thinking can be guided and inspired by the Spirit of Jesus. It is not a hopeless cause. Discovering the true accepting and affirming Jesus of faith is worth whatever effort it takes. Others before us have followed many paths to Jesus, but the paths that we have open to us today did not exist yesterday. We have to see for ourselves. We let go and move on at every turn in our journey.
There are no shortcuts. You have to work out whatever fits you as an individual. You need help, information and encouragement in working out the faith that fits you, but in the final analysis, you have to do it yourself.
MAKING DISCIPLES
The commission of Jesus to his followers to “make disciples of all people” (Matthew 28:19) was given and followed long before the New Testament was written in the form that we have it today. Jesus gave this “great commission” in about AD 30. The New Testament came into its present form more than 200 years later. If the disciples had made disciples instead of creating an institution, world history would have been radically different.
Without the written Gospels, the first followers of Jesus began to make disciples and continued the mission of Jesus. If only one disciple had made another disciple in the first year and then both of them made another disciple each the next year and this process of mathematical progression had continued for 35 years, the staggering number of disciples would have been 31 billion people: more than the total population of the human race until the present. The world would have become Christian long before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and long before any of the Gospels were written!
The basic method of Jesus was personal, face-to-face, one-on-one dialogue with a lot of listening and asking questions, just as Jesus began his work at the age of 12 in the Temple as recorded in Luke 2:46-47. Jesus made it clear that two or three gathered in his name demonstrated his presence. This approach of humble person-centered ministry is a far cry from the spectacular cast of thousands in modern evangelism and churches on television and other mass media.
Is current big evangelism, big churches and big religious business an improvement on the simplicity of Jesus? Of course not! The obvious reason is that they have not worked.
Christianity according to Jesus has not failed. It has not yet been tried.